Diluvion
by Gabriel Seraph
Summary: Violet Baudelaire thought her life of adventure was over, but no longer. After nearly fifty years of relative normalcy, a villain is attacking the homes of volunteers - but in a strange twist, the attacker uses water, not fire, to destroy, and it is up to Violet and her grandson to figure out who the culprit is. Moderate violence, mild language. Dipper will appear in the epilogue.


AN: This is a modified version of a story I first ran in my head as early as 2004, back in the days when I was at the height of my Series of Unfortunate Events fandom. It is meant to be set around that time, and is something of a "next-generation" type story. Although it is a crossover with Gravity Falls, it will be a loose connection, and will have absolutely nothing to do with any part of my massive Adventure Time/Foster's/Gravity Falls/RVN/ASOUE/Warehouse 13/Bones/as-yet-unspecified-other-fandoms crossover-verse. There will be minor similarities, but this is officially a very different universe.

Science? I don't need no stinking science! Sanity-free storytelling, that's the order of the day from me!

R&R and enjoy!

Diluvion

Chapter 1

September 21, 2004

6:56am. Violet entered the kitchen and fired up the espresso machine, a very old model imported from Italy in the sixties. This machine was so old, in fact, that it had to be held together with duct tape, and was infamously prone to steam explosions, despite her best ministrations. Maybe there was something to be said after all for the admonition in the user manual - "Every time you make an Americano, God kills a kitten." Quigley was particularly fond of quoting that one at her. Violet always responded by telling Quigley her own favorite quote: "Drink the first shot out of the espresso machine. We hope you didn't just do that, as it's deadly."

And speaking of deadly, for visitors - of which there were always many at the house - there was a notice taped behind the old Gaggia at all times, thanks to a single unfortunate incident on the part of their oldest grandson. It read:

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, RUN THE ESPRESSO MACHINE AND THE MICROWAVE SIMULTANEOUSLY.  
ANYONE CAUGHT DOING SO WILL BE SUMMARILY ANNIHILATED AND THAT IS A PROMISE!

Violet chuckled as she read her homemade warning label and sipped her fresh Americano. It was a promise that would never be fulfilled, not as long as she and Quigley were in charge of this house. She opened the newspaper which she'd just picked up from the sidewalk and scanned the front page. Nothing important. Inside, she found one tiny article good for an instant laugh: the eleventh book in Orange Riggs' popular children's series, _A String of Grim Happenings, _was hitting bookstore shelves that day. _The Catastrophic Cavern_, it was called. Violet filed this one into her memory banks, so she could remember to buy it for her grandson later. Calix Quagmire was a huge fan of Riggs' books. Violet wasn't so big on them herself - the storyline felt like it had basically been her childhood but with everyone rendered with different names - but if Calix enjoyed it, he was entitled to do so, and far be it from Violet to not spoil her grandson.

She looked up at the clock and started, nearly dropping her paper and coffee. Seven o'clock already? She would have to hurry up and get dressed. Sure, the college was only half a mile away, but traffic was notoriously awful on Highway 262, and it had a tendency to bottleneck as early as six sometimes.

Violet raced upstairs as fast as she could, put on her plain black dress, tied up her hair as she had done her entire life, and carried her rolling suitcase into the car. Quigley had wanted to spring for the Audi A8, but Violet had found the big luxury sedan too techno for her taste. She'd much preferred the new Jaguar XJR, which was stylish and well-equipped and just the right amount of old-fashioned. As usual, Violet had won out, and even Quigley had come to enjoy the Jag greatly.

Gunning the engine, Violet pressed the button on the remote she kept in the glove box so she could open the gate and head out towards 262. Surprisingly, traffic was light on the road this morning, and the only thing even close to problematic that Violet saw was a large amount of standing water at the T-intersection of Prospero Place and Green Valley Lane.

Violet drove on, not noticing the number of police cars and fire trucks gathered in the cul-de-sac of Prospero Place, or the people who were gathered in the cold dawn, staring at a house that had been virtually gutted by a sudden simultaneous bursting of every single water pipe inside it.

It took only five minutes for Violet to arrive at the parking lot for Mar Vista College. She pulled her rolling suitcase out and wheeled it across the hilly, step-filled parking lot to the engineering building. Once she was inside, Violet opened her suitcase and pulled out the supplies for today's Engineering 153 class. All the fixings for the average Rube Goldberg machine and then some were in the suitcase, all set for today's lab. Violet had come to miss the days when she herself would invent things right and left to get herself and her siblings out of impossible jams. But it warmed her heart to know she was teaching her skills to twenty eager learners each semester.

With more than an hour to go before class started, Violet arranged the supplies into matching piles and then left the room to visit Klaus in the library. All three Baudelaire siblings, plus young Beatrice, worked there in some capacity or other. Sunny ran the college's cooking show, while Beatrice taught organic chemistry in an upstairs lab. Since none of them had any real obligations before 9am, it was traditional for them to meet in the library, inside what was affectionately referred to as the Graveyard of Lost Technology, being full of gutted skeletons of LaserDisc players and a rotary-dial phone, among other things. Violet had once taken Calix to see this, and she was certain that this very place had been the inspiration for his love of all things electrical.

But Violet never got the library that day. She was interrupted by a sudden phone call from home.

"Violet?" Quigley asked. "Did you see the news?"

"No," Violet said. "I don't watch the news before leaving home, you know that."

Quigley sighed. "Find the nearest TV and put it on."

Violet returned to her lab room and turned on the TV she kept at the far end of the room. The Channel 2 News crew was standing in front of what appeared, at first glance, to be Violet and Quigley's own house. But then Violet realized it was simply another home in the same neighborhood. In Prospero Place, as it happened.

"Oh no," Violet said as something dawned on her. "That's not...?"

"No, it's their neighbors," said Quigley. "But it's a villain for sure."

"How do they know?" Violet asked.

"Whoever did it left behind a note in a plastic bag," said Quigley. "It said, 'More to follow unless you take action.' And it was signed with nothing but an eye."

"Oh, God," Violet breathed. "But why attack some innocent house?"

"Maybe they made a mistake with the address," said Quigley.

"A very narrow mistake," said Violet. "I don't believe this. They were so close to being flooded out."

"What villain uses water to attack?" Quigley asked.

Violet chewed her lip. "One we apparently haven't met yet," she said sadly, staring at the continuing news report on the water-destroyed house. She still couldn't believe how close the villainous attacker had come to subjecting home of her daughter, Sarah Pines, to such heinous treatment.


End file.
